Arrived and not ready to go

It is Friday afternoon and traffic along the I-95 and I-20 corridors was congested. I asked to be allowed an extra hour to pick up this trailer but the Powers That Be demanded I arrive no later than 1800 hours local time. This meant I had to fuel in a hurry in Florence, South Carolina and pass up my favorite truck stop deal: the 20 ounce ribeye for $9.99 deal at the Petro, also in Florence. This business is damned inconvenient sometimes.

I arrived ahead of schedule despite my gnawing hunger pains and swapped my empty trailer for one full of tires. The left side of the trailer is bulging out an impressive amount; I wonder if I will get pulled over by a cop someplace to be questioned about it.

Since I started my day at 0400 my time, my 14 hour clock runs out at 1800 my time, or 1900 local time since I'm on the east coast. I know, its confusing, but basically I had enough time to get the load and head over to the local truck stop to park it for the night.

Tomorrow I motor up towards Illinois along something resembling this route:


View Larger Map

The weekend run

I am ordered to head southwest several hundred miles to pick up a pre-loaded trailer at a Bridgestone tire plant, bound for Missouri. This after several hours of waiting at a nearby truck stop.

I had a run-in with the local lot lizard while I was waiting at the truck stop. I made the mistake of rolling down my driver's-side window more than a crack and she took the opportunity to jump up and place her hands along the top edge. Even after growling "It gets off the truck or it gets the hose!" in an ominous voice she persisted. Next time I will get my camera and start taking photos to use by the police to identify one of these creepy women.

The route:


View Larger Map

The wait, the wait...

After about 90 minutes I was given a paper slip and directions around to the back of the plant and a dock number. As I made it to the back I saw a 53' refrigerated trailer hoisted up at about 45 degrees by a contraption -- after talking to another driver it turns out that is how bulk potatoes come into the plant. I will get a pic or two if I can get away with it.

200 on the nose

Turns out the trip took me exactly 200 miles to finish. The first third and last third along US-74 was pleasant, but the middle third took three or four times as long with lots of stop-and-go traffic in small towns along the way. Very tiring, compared to driving in most places.

I'm at a Campbell's Soup plant waiting to get unloaded along with a bunch of other drivers.

Saluda, North Carolina

Try finding it on a (non computerized) map. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

Anyway, that is where I am shut down for the night. Today's drive was much easier than yesterday's and I'm just under 200 miles away from my destination, though most of that distance will be over smaller state highways.

It rained much of the day as I crossed Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee. I grew up where it rained a lot so driving in rain has never felt difficult to me, and today was no difference. Hauling this heavy load in the 55 MPH zone on the eastern side of Tennessee and the western part of North Carolina did try my patience then, as the gearing of my truck isn't set to maintain that speed very well unless the ground is level, which it definitely isn't.

Slow, long slog

Today was a boring, slow, slog type of day that I just wanted to be over as soon as possible (eg when my hours ran out). Heading from Kansas City to Atchison, then reversing course to head east took a long time on small state highways and country roads and even the simple process of getting my truck weighed and the weight adjusted took 30 minutes at the craptastic Flying J in Kansas City off of I-435.

I drove and drove and drove and the miles slowly went by along I-70 across Missouri, then finally through St. Louis during the evening rush hour and into Illinois to finish out the day. For some reason I thought I was further north and I would be going by our authorized fuel stop in Bloomington, Illinois to fill up but reality intruded and apparently I'm not. I'm going to try to squeeze what I have left in the tanks to get me just inside Kentucky to our stop in Paducah. I have friends who live there but I won't have any time this trip to stop for anything but fuel.

My load is 43,620 pounds of some sort of flour product in case anyone cares.

New! Route mapping

Starting today, each trip will include a map of the approximate route between the shipper and consignee(s) for each load. You can use your mouse to push and pull the map around in its window, adjust the zoom level, and include a satellite or hybrid map / satellite view.

Atchison, Kansas

Atchison, Kansas is apparently the birthplace of none other than Amelia Earhart. The main part of town is dominated by a large Midwest Grain facility where I am being loaded at. One of the small state highways leading to here from the Kansas City area had a 20 ton weight limit which I was under on the way in but certainly won't be on the way out.

Dropped and hooked

I arrived about 30 minutes early to my consignee this morning, went inside to hand in the paperwork and they had me drop the trailer in an open part of their lot and grab the one CFI empty there. I was in and out in less than 20 minutes -- just about a perfect scenario. Wish they were all like that.

I ran over to a nearby truckstop I saw on the way in to park and after a few hours I just now got buzzed with a new load picking up this morning in Atchison, Kansas and headed to North Carolina.

Off to Kansas City in a Peculiar fashion

When I boarded this morning I was immediately given the choice between two loads: a trip out to New Jersey that delivered in four days, or a trip just up the road to Kansas City, Missouri which delivered tomorrow. I chose the load to KC which let me spend the morning relaxing, having a nice lunch, shopping for the truck and returning my rental car.

Once I was ready, I went to local dispatch and picked up the Bill of Lading for the load. Turns out to be a load of Continental tires going to a Ford plant. Fairly heavy and, like most tire loads, the sides of the trailer are bulging out due to the way they are loaded.

I found one of my headlights out during my walk around so I brought it over to the shop and they hooked me up with a pair of new, brighter ones. Amazingly, the CFI system showed my truck having a CAT engine instead of my Cummins; they checked, and indeed I do have a Cummins. How this went undetected for several years is puzzling.

The terminal was fading away in the distance by 2:30 PM and I stopped a bit short tonight in the curiously-named town of Peculiar, Missouri, thus the title of this post. I originally intended to drive up to a Flying J truck stop a few miles from the consignee but the last few times I've been there I have been pestered by the resident lot lizard, and I don't care for their parking lot. I'm about 30 miles out so I will have plenty of time for a good run tomorrow if I get one.

I also spoke to my new fleet manager, Amanda. I was with the previous one for almost nine months and wanted a switch.

In Joplin

I made it in to Joplin just before noon yesterday for some time off. I'm due back out on the road Tuesday morning.

Happy Labor Day everyone!

A Bad Review

My satellite unit just beeped me with a message from my overlords at CFI... they took my case over the incident in Nogales a couple months back to a board of review of a few drivers who ruled it was, after all, preventable.

You can read all about the incident preventable accident here and here.

Scared to death... over nothing!

This morning I got up at 3 AM and ran my load from Waco, Texas to Laredo, Texas. It was originally due in Laredo at 0600 this morning but I know that almost none of the brokers we use are open 24 hours a day, and if they aren't they almost never open before 0800 or 0900 so I had the delivery time bumped back to let me run down here easier. I arrived at our terminal for the trailer inspection in the eight o'clock hour and by nine I was in front of the broker, fourth in a line of CFI trucks waiting to get in. Naturally, they don't open until 0930.

Eventually the broker folks arrived and got things sorted out and one-by-one the drivers dropped their trailers and drove back over to our terminal. When I returned and finished my paperwork I went by dispatch and wouldn't you know it, they already had my trip home to Joplin waiting for me. I figured it was some load that a bunch of people had already passed on but as it turns out it is very light and the trailer is solid. Lucky me.

So, after taking care of a small issue with one of the trailer lights I refueled and pointed my rig north along I-35 and cruised up to New Braunfels, Texas which lies halfway between San Antonio and Austin.

I've been driving my truck for just under 100,000 miles at this point so when I enter a truck stop I have a routine I follow when I'm looking to park. I keep my eyes peeled for any easy backing situation (a pull through, a straight pull in, a slot with a lot of space in front of it, etc.) as I mosey through the lot then circle around and grab the best I can find. This time it was a spot on the end of a line of trucks where the parking lot changes a bit so there will be no truck parked next to me on one side. There was a bunch of space in front of my spot, with two trucks facing me and an open spot between them I could use to get aligned before I made a straight back.

So, I turn away from my spot and move the cab of my truck between these two trucks and come to a stop, preparing to put my rig in reverse. All of a sudden, my truck seems to lurch in reverse and no matter how hard I stomp on the brake pedal I can't slow down!!!

It turns out that one of the trucks that I was positioning myself between decided to help me out by backing up a bit to let me make my turn and setup easier. From my perspective, though, it looked like I was suddenly in reverse and moving quickly, despite being out of gear and my foot on the brake.

Jim's backing mastery: 0
Fresh pair of Fruit-of-the-Looms: 1

Sigh.

Wacko in Waco

There were a handful of accidents on the various roads I traveled today, including two cars and one big rig mess about twenty miles north of Waco and the aforementioned Flying J (just down the street from the Hooters, natch).

As I pulled off of the interstate on to exit 331 I noticed there were a line of trucks and four wheelers backed up a bit, and the intersection seemed to be closed. I didn't have my camera out at the time, so after I parked I walked back and took some photos from the opposite side:

View all Wacko in Waco pics

The driver of this rig apparently took the right hand corner too fast and managed to roll it over... you can see the number of wreckers they had to call out to deal with it:



All the traffic going to the Flying J was routed through the secondary gas fuel island exit which made things exciting for us big rig drivers. After we turned in like cars would we had to take the other gas fuel island exit then make a big u-turn to come in the diesel side:

Flattened in West Memphis

I began this morning at our terminal in West Memphis, Arkansas with my pre-trip and fueling for today's journey. My tire pressure gauge has been giving me low readings for a while now so I decided after another set of uniformly low numbers I would go down the street to the closest Pilot and buy a new one. It confirmed that my tire pressures were just fine but when I checked my left steer tire the core inside the valve stem blew and wouldn't stop the air from releasing, flattening the tire in a minute or so.

View all Flattened in West Memphis pics

After a short cry I got on the phone with our Road Service folks and they whistled up a mobile tire changing unit to come by and fix me up. About thirty minutes later an old, beat up van arrived and the gentleman inside jacked up the front axle and had everything set straight in another thirty minutes or so.

Between the pre-trip, fueling and tire issues I was now almost two hours behind schedule and I drove from West Memphis to our Lancaster, Texas yard non-stop, where I fueled again. Barely fifteen minutes later I departed, headed for Waco, Texas to stop for the night at the Flying J truck stop just down the street from a Hooters restaurant.

Duck!

Several mornings ago I, when I was at the Greencastle, Pennsylvania Con-Way yard, I woke up to this loud chattering and various goings-on outside my cab. I'm a fairly deep sleeper and normally truck stop noises don't bother, so I was curious what was happening. I poked my head out the driver door and saw the root cause of the ruckus:

View all Duck! pics

Yes, two large bunches of ducks doing duck things in a pond that Con-Way keeps at the back of their property. They were squawking at each other, preening and basically causing a commotion.

Eventually one group flew off to bigger and better pastures (ponds?):



I was at a pretty high zoom level with my Nikon and holding down the capture button as I turned from right to left so there is some motion blur in most of these photos and you don't see all the birds that took off (there were probably two dozen in that group).

Eventually the remaining adult ducks split, and about ten minutes later one of the groups came back in for a landing:





I didn't realize it but there were a handful of baby ducklings in the pond as well -- their coloration makes them damn good hiders in a duck pond! Can you pick them out of this photo? (HINT: look at the center of the photo at the edge of the water)



Do you have all your ducks in a row?

On the road again...

It took several more hours for everything to sort itself out and a trailer released to me so I could run with it. I had started work at 2:30 AM this morning so by 10:30 more than half of my work day was shot just with waiting around.

Apparently there were seven trailer loads going from this plant down to Mexico with CFI and the broker that we got the loads from had some screwed up load numbering system that neither CFI or the shipper normally used. They really, really, really wanted load 1234xz-bob-666-A4 to be on trailer 12345, towed by truck 54321 and nothing else would do. Everyone concluded this was nuts and eventually we convinced the folks in the rear with the gear to let us take loaded trailers as they were made ready and just call in which trailer and load number we happened to have aboard.

I did something I've never done before in a big rig today. I passed an exit ramp near where I was planning on shutting down for the night and went to the next exit and made a U-turn, eating up four extra miles. Man has to do something when he's suddenly craving a DQ Blizzard, after all.

I have a TON of pics I shot this morning; perhaps 80 or 100 images in all. I'll try uploading them in Laredo as that many will require some serious bandwidth that isn't available here.

Laredo, my old friend

I dropped my trailer at Con-Way very early this morning and waited for about five hours to get a dispatch. It turns out we have seven trailer loads of dishware going from a plant here in Greencastle, Pennsylvania down to Laredo, Texas, destined for Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico. It is an 1,800 mile run that will take me about three-and-a-half days to finish.

For some reason the load numbers are screwed up so I'm parked here at the shipper waiting for CFI customer service to figure out which load I'm getting. The one I was set up for left on another truck several hours ago.

Closed and waiting

As it turns out, our new corporate masters at Con-Way take Sunday's off here in Greencastle, PA so I'll be waiting for a day at a nearby truck stop.

Running in the Rain

I got up early, as usual, and made my way south through Chicago then out the east side along the Indiana toll road and into Ohio, ending the day just inside Pennsylvania. I wasn't out of driving hours but I just didn't feel like pushing any further today. I will finish out the last couple hundred miles tomorrow morning then see what fun my corporate masters have in store for me.

I must Strenuously Object!!!

I know I've ruffled some feathers here and there, but this is too much:

(A brief note of explanation: I use the nickname Career Switch, or just Switch, on the cfidrivers.com message board. This was seen on the door of a CFI team truck in West Memphis when I was through there last.)

The sweat off my brow

After my second drop this morning my trailer was empty. Well, nearly empty. You see, the 31,000 pounds of glass windows that were offloaded from said trailer were held in place by hundreds of pounds of dunnage (dunnage is a term used to describe things that hold cargo in place, like straps, chains, lumber, rope, etc.). In this case, probably 400 pounds of brand new pine 2x4's of various lengths and perhaps a hundred pounds of cardboard.

It turns out the consignee for the second part of the load didn't want any of this stuff so they left it for me in the trailer, which I took to Franklin, Wisconsin for my next pickup. Before I dropped that trailer I had to clean it out, which meant finding a home for all of this scrap wood and cardboard. I asked the local Con-Way folks for whom I will shortly be hauling a load if they had any need for this stuff and they said nope, go thataway to the dumpsters and take care of it.

View all Dunnage Destruction pics

That particular dumpster was empty when I began.



The cardboard from the load fit into this dumpster.

All told it was another hour or so of unpaid work to take care of this. I'm very thankful it was an overcast day and only about 80 degrees out. If the temperatures were extreme it would be quite a miserable job.

Cottage Grove Middle School unload

The second unload this morning was at a middle school under construction in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, just west of Madison. This was the first time a load of mine was moved out of my trailer directly into a storage trailer, like this:

View all Cottage Grove Middle School Unload pics

Across the way was a drill rig putting in a new bore hole for water, and water gushing out as they drilled:



When I departed I had to back up at least 300 feet around a corner then make a very tight left turn to head back out the muddy parking lot.

Kiss My Glass

Glass windows and doors, of course. I delivered a small part of the shipment first thing this morning in Waunakee, Wisconsin then moved about 15 miles away to the township of Cottage Grove to unload about 15 tons of windows for the new middle school that is very much still under construction.

This load is unusual because while there are only two stops, there are four Bills of Lading -- two for each stop. The first part was because the packages were going to two different job sites, but all of this load is going here to this middle school, so I wonder why they bothered using two bills.

Another first: The trailer will not be unloaded to a dock or to the ground, but instead to the back of a storage trailer on site, where they can get to the windows as they go to install them.

Nice day for a drive

This morning I left central Missouri and made my way through St Louis and up through Illinois to just inside Wisconsin where I fueled and parked at the Pilot in Beloit. This particular Pilot is one of the more screwed up ones, as far as parking goes. The parking lot is set up in the shape of a "U" with an entry point for the fuel island and the other end being the exit.

Among the problems at this particular location is the fact that the entryway to the fuel island has a sidewalk that runs wayyyy too far down the entrance so making it in is difficult, at least if you want the pumps closest to the main building. Worse, people enter from the exit ramp to avoid the backlog at the pumps which causes delays. Worst, anyone backing in to almost any slot at the entire truck stop brings traffic to a halt.

The only reason I use this particular pilot is because there is a Walmart down the block and I needed to pick up a few things I forgot to get on the truck when I was in Joplin yesterday.

Tomorrow I deliver at two job sites (translation: places being built, usually) which is always an adventure.